The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery
Chapter 1

Gunshots were not an unusual sound in the Sprawl, so they drew very little attention. The people living nearby knew what it meant when they heard gunshots; they changed their morning routines and found a reason to linger at home over a second cup of coffee. They didn’t want to risk the stray shot or worse, the stray questions being asked later.

None of the people who were drinking a second cup of coffee at that moment were involved in the shoot out. And none of them wanted to be. But everyone who was involved with the shoot out wished that they were, in fact, having coffee.

In particular, Simon Hinge wished that he was having coffee. Simon was not a coffee drinker. Nor had he just woken up. He was a guard of The Albino, and had been working for several hours now. But once the shooting started, and he had to actually ante up to the tough guy act he’d been playing all these years, he suddenly wished he had a crappy factory job that would allow him to be at home, sipping on a second cup of coffee.

Simon had never actually fired his gun before that morning. He was a little surprised that it even worked; he hadn’t tested it when he bought it. Only his employment with The Albino had ensured good quality. Had he been anyone else, he probably would have ended up with a pistol that had more purpose as a paperweight.

Which, in retrospect, might have served him just fine.

It was hard for Simon not to break down into a panic. This was his first gun fight, but he wanted people to think, after the fact, that it wasn’t. So he held in his terror, quieted his own whimpering, and tried to think what a veteran of many fights would do.

First of all, he thinks, a veteran would not cower behind cover. He’d stand up and shoot back, at least until it was time to reload.

Simon didn’t want to think about reloading; he didn’t know how.

Still, he stood up and prepared to fire at the idiots who had thought it was a good idea to attack The Albino in broad daylight. What idiots. Why would they even think that was a good idea?

As soon as he was out from under cover, thinking how stupid those people were, Nathan Roeder shot him in the chest.

As Simon fell back and started feeling his lungs fill with a fluid they were never meant to feel, he again wished he was a coffee drinker.

Nathan, on the other hand, ducked back down behind cover after dropping the guard. He had no idea that Simon was incompetent, or that he could barely shoot the ground. He didn’t know that Simon would be out of the fight as soon as he ran out of bullets, because the poor bastard didn’t know how to reload. All Nathan knew was that he had to get inside the club, and it was easier to do during the day, when it was closed. He needed to get Felicia out of there, and the longer she was with The Albino, the worse things he would be able to do to her.

He tried to tell himself he wasn’t in love with her, tried to convince himself it was just lust. That made sense, after all. She was designed for lust, had been bred to it and prenatally altered to that purpose. She was better looking than he would ever hope to be, than anyone could ever hope to be. That had to be it. He just wanted her body.

But hard as he tried, he couldn’t forget the conversations he’d had with her, the talks that had shown that, beautiful as she was, it was her secondary asset.

Nathan probably would have sat there, reminiscing about Felicia, thinking about the things he wanted to do with her, and trying to convince himself that he wasn’t in love, for at least an hour. God knows what would have happened to Felicia in that time. Luckily for Nathan, fate would not allow him to remain in reverie.

Lucky for Nathan, though, was unlucky for Max Wells, who at that moment took a bullet to the stomach. A fatal wound, if not treated. At that moment, more than any other, Max lamented having broken his own rule: never stick his neck out for anyone. It never went well before he had that rule, and things clearly were not going well after he broke it.

Max collapsed down behind the makeshift barrier he and Nathan have been hiding behind and screamed out a loud expletive.

The scream, not the shot, woke up Nathan.

“Max!”

Max glared at Nathan. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “This is all your fault.”